If You’re Not Micromanaging, You’re Not Leading

The single most revealing moment in the coverage of JPMorgan’s multibillion dollar debacle can be found in this take-your-breath-away passage from The Wall Street Journal:

On April 30, associates who were gathered in a conference room handed Mr. Dimon summaries and analyses of the losses. But there were no details about the trades themselves. “I want to see the positions!” he barked, throwing down the papers, according to attendees. “Now! I want to see everything!”

When Mr. Dimon saw the numbers, these people say, he couldn’t breathe.

Only when he saw the actual trades — the raw data — did Dimon realize the full magnitude of his company’s situation. The horrible irony: The very detail-oriented systems (and people) Dimon had put in place had obscured rather than surfaced his bank’s horrible hedge. What he’d dismissed as a “tempest in a teapot” less than a month earlier had turned into a multibillion dollar humiliation. If Dimon had seen those positions — naked and unsummarized — back then, could his bank have saved itself and its CEO a lot of money and embarrassment?

Dimon (whom I’ve met and admire enormously) acknowledges he was too complacent. But this vignette affirms my belief that leaders need to “go to the source” even before they turn to their best people. Seeing the data raw instead of analytically pre-chewed can have enormous impact on executive perceptions. That’s not to minimize or marginalize the importance of analysis and interpretation. But when tempests threaten to outgrow their teapots, nothing creates situational awareness faster than seeing with your own eyes what your experts are trying to synthesize and summarize. There’s a reason why great chefs visit the farms and markets that source their restaurants: The raw ingredients are critical to success.

At one global telecommunications giant, for example, a critical network software upgrade was not only slipping further behind schedule, but the bug density was slowly creeping up, as well. The program managers’ key performance indicator dashboards showed nothing alarmingly unusual except the seemingly usual slippage and delays associated with a complex project with moving parts worldwide. The executive responsible for the deliverable (but not the software engineering itself) felt something amiss. The error rates felt too high and the delays too long, given the clarity of project milestones. He wasn’t technically sophisticated enough to read the code or analyze the testing, but he asked several project managers to share how their code was being documented. The raw material astonished and appalled him. The code was both hastily and poorly documented; the result was confusion and ambiguity that not only created delays but introduced errors into the software. The deadline-driven programmers, unfortunately, thought nothing of improvising just-in-time documentation via email, and misunderstandings and typos quickly propagated program-wide. The result was a worsening mess.

The executive intervention — making documentation a priority, streamlining version coordination, and changing the testing protocols — didn’t get the complex program back on schedule, but stopped things from getting worse, and dramatically improved both product quality and post-launch maintainability. It could never have happened unless leadership had the courage and competence to go to the source. Is this micromanagement? You bet! But real leaders are constantly called upon to create new contexts for people to succeed. Sometimes holding people accountable is the path of least resistance rather than what’s best for the organization.

There’s both a cultural and personal difference between this kind of micromanagement and being a control freak. In the former, leaders want to see — and feel — what’s going on with their own eyes and gut; they want to draw upon their own experiences and expertise. In the latter, they want a greater command of detail in order to tell people what to do. The best micromanagers (like Dimon) go to the source, so they can see, listen, and understand better; the control freaks do it to remind people that they run the whole show.

Yes, there’s something vaguely mistrustful and distrustful about insisting on a diet of raw data rather than a richly prepared presentation of nutritious analytics. The core message — that you want/need to see for yourself — may feel disempowering to some. But there’s a fundamental difference between trusting your people and trusting their data. Trust me, you’ll breathe easier if you go to the source when those teapots start whistling a little too sharply.